One good thing about living in a global-village world is that the food supply diversifies. An extraordinary array of exotic fruits has found its way into the produce sections of our supermarkets in the past few years, from all corners of the globe.
Since the kiwi explosion in the late 1970s, we have come to know, if not love, cherimoyas, cactus pears, carambolas, pepinos and pomegranates. Horned melons from Africa and mamey sapotes from Central and South America are getting the push now from produce brokers, and soon fresh lychee nuts will be as common as kumquats.
According to Karen Caplan, president of the California-based distributor Frieda’s, and daughter of Frieda Caplan, who started the craze for kiwis, “The expectation level of the American consumer is so high now that anything offered as new these days is readily accepted by grocers. … It took us 18 years after we started importing kiwis in 1962 to get that strange-looking little fruit accepted and into the mainstream. The lead time is so much shorter these days.”
Waiting in the wings are Oriental rambutans, mangosteens and lychees. And there is even talk of developing that most notorious of fruits, the dreaded durian, for the burgeoning West Coast Thai and Malaysian populations who cannot do without the pungent fruit from their homelands.
When one starts talking about strange fruits, strange words come to mind. Just as the bristled little kiwi added “prickles” to our descriptive fruity vision, so many new terms came to mind when viewing exotic unknown fruits on a recent trip to Thailand.
There’s the almost “fetal” mangosteen with its bricklike outer shell and its white “unborn” fruit; there’s the ugly little “hag” of a rambutan in its hairy shell; and there’s durian, the strangest creature of all, with its fierce smell and its “kidney”-shaped fruit.
— Once you have tasted durian, you will never forget the experience. Most people either intensely love or hate the fruit, which first assaults from a distance with its half-rotten odor. The smell is so foul that hotels and airlines ban it. Shaped like a spiked oval mace, the fruit must be handled only with gloves. It is a dangerous object when thrown.
Durians grow atop tall trees. When ripe, they smash down through the branches to the ground intact. The fruits are gathered by natives who wear crash helmets or inverted metal basins on their heads to protect them from falling fruit. Intrepid collectors camp out near their trees to keep watch in fruiting season, and some of the most valuable fruits can fetch as much as $30 each.
It takes a reasoned insertion of a blade at just the right linear point along the spiny seams to crack the fruit apart. Inside the firm, white rind are lobes of fruit like giant yellow kidneys. The flesh is pulpy, sweet. It clings to pale brown pits. People claim the fruit is an aphrodisiac, but it is more likely that the high calorie count (153 calories per 100 grams) affects the system.
Expatriate Thais addicted to durian eat avocado mixed with sugar and fish sauce during durian season in memory of the fruit.
— As an antidote to durian, Oriental fruit sellers offer mangosteens, thought to be a cooling fruit. Since durian usually is eaten as an entire meal, a good host will provide the small, oxblood-colored mangosteen as postscript to a durian feast.
The mangosteen, an antique-looking fruit with small nicks and bronze stipules, is cut open around the center through the soft brick of its shell. Remove the top, and there are five to seven sectioned divisions to the inner fruit that sit, gleaming and opalescent, like a newly peeled garlic head. You suck the plummy flesh of its refined tropical essence.
Like a lychee, a mangosteen is ripe when the fruit can be shaken and emits a sound. The flesh has begun to withdraw slightly from the rind. The fruit has good keeping quality and is being primed as an important export in the future.
According to Caplan, mangosteen trees were planted in British Honduras 20 years ago, and the fruit was imported to the States at that time. “It is possible that we could have mangosteens again if irradiation is approved,” she says.
“Dacus dorsalis, an Oriental fruit fly, is a culprit that we need protection from, and currently there is no [U.S. Department of Agriculture) approved treatment for the pest, but irradiation could easily take care of that problem. We think mangosteens will be wonderfully popular in the future.”
— And how much longer can we get by without rambutan, one of the most endearing little fruits ever created? Egg-shaped and bewhiskered, the beautiful scarlet fruit is tipped with long green feelers that make it look like a fevered horse chestnut.
Derived from the Malay word “rambut,” meaning “hair,” the fruit is indigenous to Southeast Asia. Twice a year in season, the bushy, wide-crowned trees are weighed down with bunches of fruit.
Shake the little beastie fruits to make sure they are ripe, then cut around the thin, pliable skin and squeeze out the firm, translucent, slightly eyeball-looking flesh that tastes like a big sweet lychee.
— Of all the new exotic fruits, lychees are most likely to enter the mainstream market and consumer consciousness soon. If you know the fruit only as a not-very-palatable Chinese restaurant dessert tasting of tin, the fresh version will come as a happy surprise. In its natural state, the 1-inch-diameter fruit is covered with a bright coral, leatherlike shell. Within an hour of harvesting, the shell begins to turn tan; only when it is a deep, rich brown and the fruit shakes freely in the shell is a lychee ready for consumption.
Lychees keep refrigerated for several weeks and can even be frozen, as are mangosteens and durian pulp for the Japanese market. Eat any of these fruits straight from the freezer and the taste and texture will be similar to a frozen fruit ice.
Stephanie Johnson, marketing manager for J.R. Brooks & Son, a Homestead grower and importer of exotic fruits, says that June and July are the peak months for lychees.
If you see fresh lychees, slice them, remove half the shell and, for a pretty presentation, bed them in a flat bowl filled with crushed ice.
While lychees are best in their natural state, they also can be found in recipes for crab salad, as an accompaniment to roasted duck, in sorbets and tropical fruit salads, which is one of the best ways to use most of the exotic fruits that are currently available to us.
Because many fruits such as papaya, mangoes and passion fruit are picked green and held in cold storage, their wonderful tropical flavors are muted. A gentle heating in a bit of wine or fruit juice, a gentle spicing with ginger or lemon grass, and strange fruits will blossom into a semblance of the lush, fragrant creatures they are when ripe in foreign lands.
